March 23, 2006

Plagiarism

by hilzoy

I really hadn't intended to write another post on puzzling things conservatives have recently said or done. However, the story of Ben Domenech (aka Augustine)'s apparent plagiarism made me change my mind. If you haven't seen it yet, here are some of the examples:

* Via a dkos diary: Here's a humor piece that Domenech published in his college paper. It's lifted from PJ O'Rourke. Here's a link I hope will work, to Amazon.com's 'Reader'; if that doesn't work, use this, and click where it says 'p. 176'. I won't excerpt, since that would require typing the O'Rourke in, but trust me: this one just goes on and on and on.

* From another dkos diary: Compare Domenech's review of "Bringing Out the Dead" to this one from Salon.com. The plagiarized part starts with the sentence "Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) is a New York City medic who's haunted by the ghosts of the people he couldn't save, particularly that of a young girl named Rose." It's the second sentence of the Salon review's third paragraph, and (with 'haunted' changed to 'confronted') the beginning of the fourth paragraph of Domenech's.

* Still more from a dkos diarist: But note: I can't find a date for the Cox piece, so it could be that Domenech's piece preceded it. I've emailed the author, and will update if he replies.

"Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, wriggling countless tentacles and snapping their jaws. They're known as the Phantoms, alien thingies that, for three decades, have been sucking the life out of the earthlings of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.” Swollen nightmares from a petri dish, they're the kind of grotesque whatsits horror writer H.P. Lovecraft would have kept as pets in his basement."

"Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, splaying their tentacles and snapping their jaws, dripping a discomfiting acidic ooze. They're known as the Phantoms, otherworldly beings who, for three decades, have been literally sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human."

I actually found my own bit. I noticed that when I clicked 'Home' on the reviews from Domenech's college paper, I got an error message, and I wanted to confirm that this was, in fact, legit. The ensuing Google search landed me with a whole list of Domenech's articles, and since (as a professor) I have some experience with using Google to discover plagiarism, I decided to try my hand at it. I didn't check many of them (life is short), but I did find this bit, from reviews of Toy Story Two:

"In this sequel, Woody (Tom Hanks) gets snatched at a garage sale by a bad guy, Big Al, voiced by Wayne Knight (Seinfeld's Newman, forever destined to play the role of an overweight jerk). Unbeknownst to most everybody else, Woody is now a valuable collector's item, part of a set of '50s Western-themed toys being put together by an unscrupulous dealer. He intends to sell the toys to a museum in (where else?) Japan. (...)

"In this sequel, Woody gets snatched at a garage sale by a bad guy. Unbeknownst to most everybody else, Woody is now a valuable collector's item, part of a set of '50s, Western-themed toys being put together by an unscrupulous dealer.

He intends to sell the toys to a museum in (where else?) Japan. (...)

Woody's old gang -- the timid dinosaur, Hamm the piggy bank, Slinky dog and Mr. Potato Head -- leave the security of Andy's bedroom to rescue their pal, led by the intrepid Buzz Lightyear."

***

I don't know Ben Domenech/Augustine at all well. The only post of his I remembered before this all happened was a spectacularly ill-informed piece on stem cells; I contemplated writing something on it, but decided to comment on RedState instead. So I really have no idea what to make of this. I'd be interested in the views of those who follow his work more closely.

However, there are a few things I do know.

First, plagiarism is very serious. I don't know how much this view is shared by people who don't write for a living, but for writers, it's pretty much the ultimate dishonor. Your reputation as a writer or a scholar depends on your written work, and the discovery that you have been passing someone else's work off as your own is the closest thing we have to a mortal sin.

Second, in my opinion, the Post should not have hired him, not because he's conservative, but because he has no journalistic experience, and besides, his first few blog posts were pretty dreadful. But if these charges pan out and they don't fire him, they have no standards at all. Likewise, if they pan out, you have to ask yourself why the Post didn't do a better job of vetting him before they hired him.

Third, what could he have been thinking when he took the Post job? If anything on earth is predictable, it's that if the Post hired a lightning rod like Domenech, his work would be gone over with a fine toothed comb. Could he possibly not have anticipated this? If he did, why didn't he just come up with a decent excuse to say no?

"Ethical rules are the rules for a reason, and the Republican Party is one that respects the rule of law – that means really respecting it, not dancing along the edge. Because when the Democrats play dirty, they should have to stretch the truth; they should have to lie and connive; and they should have to find people like Ronnie Earle to do it for them. If they don’t have to do that, then something’s wrong. (...)

Ethical relativists do not belong in a party founded on moral absolutes. And just because the “Do as you're told” Republicans get elected doesn't mean we should ever let them get power. We need to push them out, for the good of the country and the party, and 2006 is the year to do it."

I completely agree about the need to respect moral values. If these charges are as well-founded as they seem to be, it will be interesting to see whether Ben Domenech has the guts to apply these principles to his own case, or whether he deploys morality only against other people.

(h/t Atrios)

***

Update: RedState's response is here. If you strip away the parts about liberals being awful, the response to the plagiarism accusations is:

"And now those opposed to Ben have googled prior writings that on the surface appear suspicious, but only because permissions obtained and judgments made offline were not reflected online by an out dated and out of business campus newspaper. But that's all the opponents want - just enough to sabotage a career, though in the process they will sabotage themselves. Facts have no meaning. Only impressions have any bearing on this. The charges of plagarism are false, meant to bring down a good and honest man. The presented facts to prove plagarism are specious -- products of shoddy work."

I can't believe they have read all the cases. It's not just a college newspaper; it's stuff that appeared in the National Review. Speaking for myself, I would not have written on this if I hadn't looked at them, and concluded that they were not specious. There are also more than enough cases to make you wonder: can all of these have a benign explanation? I am prepared to discover that they do. But I can't imagine that Erick (who wrote the RedState piece) would be as confident as he seems to be if he had read all the cases that are coming out.

I also can't imagine that he wrote his piece without talking to Domenech. If all this turns out somehow to be baseless, well and good. If not, it's hard to imagine that Domenech hasn't just added lying to his friends and defenders to plagiarism.

Ben Domenech let everyone know about the imaginary raping of his sister.

Ben did this while explaining to the world why he was "resigning" from his cushy job, in spite of the allegedly convincing nature of "some" of the "arguments" he presented to his bosses.

My comment here was a response to Ben's provocation and, in my opinion, a reasonable one.

You see, Ben likes to pretend that the world is divided between Jesus lovin' "conservatives" like himself and amoral "leftists" who want to see his sister raped. When someone tells Ben they want to take a poop into Ben's mouth, Ben apparently thinks they really want to do that.

And Ben isn't the only one who likes to pretend that people who express themselves in colorful creative ways are speaking literally when they do so. There are some people lurking here as well.

Please: get over yourselves. Ben Domenech is a low-life plagiarist. Now he wants you to feel bad for him because someone allegedly said something nasty about Ben's sister.

Probably Ben was asked by many readers of his blog to fornicate with himself. Did you notice that Ben did not mock those people for daring him to do the impossible? Nope -- Ben chose to go with the comment about his sister. So shocking!! So reprehensible!!

Please spare me.

Read Ben's final RedState post again and try to imagine how ill someone must be to write something like that. He has a long road ahead of himself if he wants to be rehabilitated.

Can I make a prediction? Ben Domenech isn't going to change. He may not plagiarize, but he'll continue to lie. And when he's caught, he'll try to make YOU feel sorry that he got caught by mentioning that "someone" wanted to put a broom handle in his mommy's wee-wee or some such nonsense.

Please: do not fall for this crap.

Playtime is over folks. It's really time to wake up. Time to clean house. Time to keep your eye on the ball.

If Ben's sister was worth defending, she'd be out there denouncing Ben and his worthless fundie parents.

Slart added words and removed words on someone's blog with no attribution whatever that an editor had done so.

I guess my comment to that effect wasn't sufficient clue.

Very well: I, Slartibartfast, do solemnly swear that I edited this comment in the following manner: replaced an occurrence of f*** with[deleted] and one occurrence of a****** with [deleted]. Which deleted replaced which word will be left as an exercise for the reader.

Probably bringing up that I have, for various reasons, deleted posts, would be a bad move at this time. Well, I'm all about bad moves.

And no, Gary, I didn't do any surgery at all to any post that no longer is recognizable in anywhere near its original form.

Walter,
Rather than get all self righteous, I suggest that a better way of putting it would have been this

----

But in the course of accusing me of racism, homophobia, bigotry, and even (on one extensive Atrios thread) of having a sexual relationship with my mother, the leftists shifted their accusations to ones of plagiarism. You can find the major examples here: I link to this source only because I believe it's the only place that hasn't yet written about how they'd like to rape my sister.

What surprised me was Domenach's claim that every other liberal blog with the exception of ObWi stated (or implied) that they'd like to rape her sister. While this might simply say something about Domenach's state of mind, it seems to me to reveal a mighty inclination for guilt by association and I wonder how this squares with the multiple assertions at Redstate that Ben is a 'gentleman' or with the people who seek to suggest that the problem is not Domenach, but with those who called him out.
-----

Unfortunately, by claiming that 'the folks around here' are fooled by this, you simply set yourself out as the only person with any insight, which tends to get people in trouble in my experience. Good luck on finding your voice, though.

Unfortunately, by claiming that 'the folks around here' are fooled by this, you simply set yourself out as the only person with any insight, which tends to get people in trouble in my experience. Good luck on finding your voice, though.

Thanks for the kind thoughts.

In my opinion, you write like a slf-bsrbd prss pnts who wants to impress everyone with your oh-so-subtle barbs.

The amazing thing is to me is that even though we have basically the same opinion, WC chooses to vent his ire on those who probably agree on the substance. The fact is that at some time, the war has to end and you've got to live with the people you disagree with. I really wonder why this often is a feature of discourse on the left.

Slart, you needn't have been so hesitant. As it was, I thought maybe you were taking dpu's 8:04 PM feelings seriously and were purposely letting WC rant so that we'd all be converted by the end of the evening.

You got the links right, but you got the quoted text swapped around for the NRO/Steve Murray case....that is, you've got Murray's 'Final Fantasy' review text credited to Domenech and vice versa.

I did a little more research, and finally came up with DATES for this particular case. (Public charges are plagiarism are serious and therefore ought to be backed by as much evidence as possible.) The NRO movie review you link to is dated July 14-15, 2001. The Murray review distributed widely to several online newspapers (probably all affiliated with Cox) is usually undated in Google hits, but here is one archived news page containing the review that is dated July 11, 2001:

Thus if one party plagiarized the other, it probably couldn't have been Murray copying from Domenech. That's very important to take note of. Also, those dates present enough time to make it plausible that Domenech consulted Murray's review while writing his own. Specifically, Murray's review was apparently up on the web at least three days before the NRO review is dated.
If you feel like bolstering your blog charges, you might want to link to the page noted above that gives the July 11 date.

Also, am I the only one who finds Domenech's quote to have an apparent grammatical "typo" in it, of the sort that one might produce very easily (have done it myself many times when editing my own work in a word processor) after pasting a sentence in, then making edits to it? Domenech's "sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human" just doesn't make sense to me. But the similar line in Murray's review does make sense: "sucking the life out of the earthlings of 'Final Fantasy'". It's as if Domenech accidentally edited a copied "life out of the earthings" and his own thought "life out of the humans" to get the resulting phrase that contains the redundant-sounding wording.

By the way, I'm a cultural/political conservative. But you and a few other bloggers have convinced me that someone, probably Domenech, appears to have plagiarized here. Good job. I'm into truth, and seek to make that the basis of my own politics.